IQ

I’m an IQ blogger, obviously. But there are fundamental questions to be asked that don’t ever seem to be. For example, why would anyone administer a WAIS instead of Ravens Progressive Matrices when the former takes far longer? There must be more potency. But I don’t know that there is, and if so, to what degree. Pumpkinperson said he was going to write a brief post on this soon. I look forward to that. Another to be asked is why do IQ pundits reportedly accept results far out on the tail (e.g. 190+?) It doesn’t make sense. Surely they must understand that tests such as the Mega haven’t been normed sufficiently in order to produce a full distribution of results? And even if they were, being that they’re open-source, there is an indefinite amount of time to work on them. Pumpkinperson argues that tests such as the Mega are more akin to graduating at the top of your class in a Harvard physics graduate program. Obviously not a formal IQ test, but a task that simply cannot be completed below some threshold of cognitive ability. The problem is, it’s not universally understood to be true that most people couldn’t complete it fairly well in a given amount of time. I don’t think they could, but to ascribe IQ scores to a certain amount of questions completed accurately when there simply haven’t been that many people tackling it is profoundly anti-scientific. And this is what happens with people like Chris Langan.

There are some extremely cognitively gifted individuals that are known in the public sphere for reasons other than their intellectual prowess. Like Terence Tao. Though I do not understand it, his work in mathematics is regarded as brilliant. And he’s obviously smart, but that’s besides the point. Pumpkinperson calculated his “math” IQ to be 180. This raises some questions: why are we even assigning a math IQ when g is understood to be measured by either fluid or crystallized intelligence? On the Weschler scales, these are respectively measured as Performance IQ and Verbal IQ. The final score is a composite of both. It isn’t that I feel the Weschler scales are perfect, because I don’t. (I’ll address this later.) But Pumpkinperson so frequently gauges IQ off this type of assessment, so I can’t see why he would give Tao a pass and assess him off his math ability.

But let’s imagine that Tao’s math IQ, whatever that is, can assume the place of “performance IQ” on the WAIS. The verbal score is in need of measurement, and Pumpkinperson claims to have figured that one out as well. He came up with a score of 135, although one commenter noted that the score Tao achieved as a youngster isn’t very distinguishable from sheer guessing. No matter. But if we combine his two major subtests, we are left with a composite score of 156.5. Why, then, do so many people cite an IQ of 200+ for him? Jordan Peterson likes to say that as IQ increases, the scatter between different types increases. That may well be true, but on Weschler scales you don’t just get to overlook any aspect of it. The far end of the distribution doesn’t just get a pass. Maybe that’s why he claims a 150+ IQ, when his GRE scores indicate the contrary. If everyone played to their strengths, everyone would get an IQ boost. It just doesn’t work like that.

James Watson is a Fucking G

The man is 89, so it’s understandable that he isn’t under the impression that his statements are bellicose. Actually, scratch that. His statements aren’t provactive; they aren’t inflammatory. They are firmly rooted in science- perhaps not the science Watson became world-renowned for, but science.

From Britain’s The Independent:

Dr. Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours- whereas all the testing says not really.”

The public and particularly the mainstream media like to dismiss his comments as musings from a crazy old man with no firm grip on reality. The sad irony being that the reverse is true- and the man’s 89- and THE DATA IS AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC AT LARGE. I hesitate to write these posts because they’ve been fantastically restated by individuals far more established than me. There isn’t too much to contribute here, other than additional vocal support for the politically incorrect intellectual coalition. Meanwhile, I live on the left coast, and I’m quite sure California might just switch its stance on the death penalty lest anyone speak a little truth in this godforsaken state.

Average IQ does not represent every individual

Yeah, this is something fairly obviously and I’m pretty certain most of my readers understand this. But true racists love to tout the average IQ’s of Hispanics and Blacks as representative of every individual in their respective ethnic group. This is not the case. I’m mixed race (half Hispanic and half White) and I feel my IQ is above the average of both norms.

A Little Self Love

I’m fairly certain I’m the youngest blogger of Human BioDiversity out there. Conservatively, I’m going to name the several HBD bloggers that I’m aware of and make an IQ comparison based on these norms.

• Audacious Epigone
• Steve Hsu
• Greg Cochran 
• Pumpkinperson
• Lion of the Blogosphere
• Jayman 
• Steve Sailer 
• Robert Lindsay 
• Razib Khan

That’s all I can really name off the top of my head. Assuming the average IQ of this group is 135(really, a conservative estimate,) and assuming an eighteen point disparity between myself and the average, my IQ should lie around the 153 mark. Assuming I’m smarter than all of them by virtue of my youth, that is.  This is obviously a massive extrapolation, but assuming perfect correlations would be the case.

The reality is I’m pretty sure my IQ is in the ballpark of 120. I’m not especially great at math, but I can hold my own verbally. 

Meanwhile, on Some Remote Farm

Chris Langan, popularized for his performance on the Mega IQ test, ostensibly the smartest man in the United States, is revered on a false pretense. This is interesting because a plurality of comments on a YouTube video where he is interviewed indicate that most people don’t believe IQ tests are representative of intelligence. This nothing new; however, though they aren’t aware of it, they aren’t exactly wrong. Though IQ tests are obviously the best metric available and for the most part capture the defining aspects of intelligence, the test Langan took in particular falls somewhere short of painting an accurate picture of his cognitive abilities (at least relative to the general population.)

The Mega Test at face value is highly g loaded, with the assessment partitioned into verbal analogies and visio-spatial problems. But I’m not arguing against that. I am, however, vehemently contending that the test has been normed sufficiently to produce a full range of scores and a distribution that mirrors the Gaussian curve found in the general population.

Given that the test is open source and has no time constraints, I doubt the validity of his score. Nothing on his Quora page indicates profound intelligence, either. Though he seems to embrace real science more now; this hasn’t always been the case, evidence by his CTMU.

At least he’s a solid writer.

• https://www.quora.com/profile/Chris-Langan

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (For Ethnic Europeans in the United States)

Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a book in 2011 titled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Not incidentally, Caplan is also keenly aware of IQ and its valid, predictive properties.

See here: “I’m an IQ realist, all the way.  IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.”  A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success.  Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.”

I respect him far more for daring to even address the topic of intelligence, despite how crucical it is to an academic discipline like economics, where financial success is predicated on selection for talent (for the vast majority of jobs, cognitive ability is being selected.) Stultifying political correctness plagues our universities, though economics is perhaps the most conservative field- and this isn’t saying much, with the proportion of liberals narrowly edging out the conservatives (I read this somewhere on Razib’s page, I think.) Also, the individual institution matters as well; the proportion of conservatives or merely tolerance for right wing views could be above the mean. At any rate, this signifies intellectual honesty to some tangible degree.

Still, some maneuvering has to occur if he is to balance his political views with his knowledge regarding IQ. What follows as a corollary from IQ as an independent property is mean differences among different populations. Caplan understands this. He’ll never explicitly say it, because at the end of the day he’s affiliated with a university and there is a political threshold that even the most ape-shit reactionary can’t cross when one is affiliated with higher learning in the United States.

A brief overview of notable populations in the United States and their associated IQ scores:

1. Ashkenazi Jews: 112
2. East Asians: 104
3. Gentile Whites: 100
4. Hispanics: 95
5. African Americans: 85

Hispanics are rapidly growing as a population in the United States and they reproduce far more quickly than Whites do. This is uncontroversial. However, the associated effects of lower intelligence, but not exclusively lower intelligence, is the lack of assimilation and its political implications.

Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist. Essentially, anarcho-capitalism is the political philosophy of society with no government, steered solely through voluntary transactions. I harbor many sympatheties for anarcho-capitalism. I’m libertarian, and I advocate for the most freedom that is palpable in society. But it is difficult to reconcile IQ literature with a notable tenet of anarcho capitalism; namely, open borders. With Caplan’s book, I feel he is attempting to ameliorate the relatively sterile white population into reproducing more to counteract the rapidly growing Hispanic population. Now, I know even with a white majority in the United States we have nothing remotely close to anarcho-capitalist society. But we have rights. We have a constitution. And we have significantly more liberty than any other country on Earth. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but Caplan likely feels the mass immigration of Hispanics could potentially spark a reverse trend in the state of our liberty. One need only look at the many failed socialist Latin American states for evidence of this.

Credit: The Audacious Epigone

He doesn’t explicitly say this, but as I said before, Caplan is a university affiliate, so there are intrinsic limitations on what he can publish. Caplan doesn’t need to cater to the white population of society by cat-calling them with a title like the one of this blog post. His readers are primarily white already, by virtue of self selection. Those that read consistently have higher IQ’s on average than those who don’t (this is obviously true intuitively, though I don’t know of any research on it) and those that are familiar with Bryan Caplan are also selected for higher intelligence- he’s a relatively obscure economist, who advocates for a fringe political ideology. Whites account for  >65% of society, and also have a fairly high mean intelligence. 

The counter argument would be that Caplan can’t reasonably expect his book to make a palpable difference in the political tides of the United States with such a limited reader pool. My qualm with this is humans are irrational creatures, and we want to believe our work has an effect beyond what it truly does. For Caplan, this may be the case, as this book isn’t centered primarily on economics and as a result is more accessible to the general population. 

Elucidating some uncompromising data

John tends to fall prey to headlines that perhaps make sense at face value, but do not hold water when you think critically about them. He’s generally perceived as intelligent, but an IQ value of 130 is likely pushing it. I feel more and more that I’m not so intelligent, as far too many people seem to be more intelligent than I am. IQ 130 is significant, and I find more and more I cannot gratuitously hand out that value to every seemingly intelligent person I encounter. The distribution just does not work in that fashion. The only people I’m certain have an IQ at or approaching that level are Jill and Jack. Beyond that, assuming a normal distribution only eleven other people in our graduating class have an IQ that high. But there’s evidence to suggest that the distribution is in fact lower than white norms, given that the student body is predominantly low-income and Hispanic. There are, however, two distinct qualities of our school that may mediate the statistical deficits. Namely, we have a continuation school that absorbs some portion of the lower-achieving students, who do tend to be of lower intelligence. Our standardized test scores, a rough proxy for intelligence, consistently hover around the 75th percentile. This mildly contravenes the intelligence research that pins Hispanic-Americans at a 94 IQ, or the 34.457th percentile. How are we to compromise between these two data sets? Perhaps standardized tests as rough proxy for intelligence are just that- rough. That may be the case, or Hispanics at my school plainly operate at a higher mean intelligence than the national average for their own ethnicity. This doesn’t seem to be the case; as stated before, the school is predominantly lower income: 65.1 percent of the student body qualifies for free or reduced price lunch, and 73.4 percent of the school is Hispanic. Both data points stack neatly upon each other. I tend to believe in the former theory, as it’s been established that SAT scores can be increased a “paltry” 100 points with intensive preparation. But using high precision 2016 SAT data reveals that the difference between a 1100 SAT score and a 1000 SAT score is sixteen percentiles; this maps out neatly to a seventeen percentile difference between Tustin High’s test scores and the state mean. But do better teachers/curriculum really amount to a staggering seventeen percentile disparity? It could be the case, if we view superior teaching as a linear model where the information retained by students is higher on a daily basis, culminating in substantial variation in the aggregate quantity of information retained. Another hypothesis is that even despite Hispanic-Americans in the United States being predominantly low income, the Hispanics at Tustin High school are less deluged by low income families, or those Hispanics that are conventionally labeled as low-income are less so than the Hispanic mean of categorized “low income families.” I don’t have specific numbers on that at the moment, nor am I readily aware for the qualifying income for “free or reduced lunch.” However, if Hispanics at my school are in less poverty than the national average for Hispanic poverty, this indicates slightly higher intelligence. Coupled with better than average teaching, this may conceivably explain the standardized testing results falling at the 75th percentile.

    I like to view society with respect to its ignorance of intelligence and human biodiversity in general as analogous to alchemy. It functions on an algorithm that is intrinsically flawed- and though social progress can be made notwithstanding, it’s destined to find out the  “right” answers only through carving out some road that consciously avoids a large variable. If an alchemist happens upon some experiment using his own methodology that just so happens to be scientifically valid, it does not justify his philosophy for doing so. But the alchemist will treat it as such, and though he labored tirelessly everyday prior to no avail, his scientific finding will galvanize his passion for pseudoscientific malpractice. Or, more mildly: John is catching fish from the sky, and he has brought with him a large net in order to catch the most that his paraphernalia will allow. Josh had the same idea, and he brings with him an equally large net. John positions himself in an area where every minute, one hundred and twenty fish land in his net. Josh, with markedly lower cognitive ability, decides to venture off into an area that leaves him with a far more moderate rate of one fish per minute. As these things happen to be, the fish that land in Josh’s net shouldn’t otherwise be there: the designated area for fish-plummeting is firmly within twenty feet of John’s position, and fish that exit that area do so only because of wind currents. After an hour of menial fish-catching, Josh has devised a method to improve his rate up to two fish per minute! It’s a net increase of 100%, and Josh returns home in a incandescent disposition. John, on the other hand, came home with over 5,000 fish.

12/5/17

    The flaw is obvious, and though Josh made the most of his unfortunate positioning, the fish he collected were some minute percentage of what he conceivably may have caught.

    A simple concept-perhaps this should be relegated to my General Ideas document. Regardless, the reason any video or website’s target demographics become less prevalent the more popular it gets, is because the more attention it attracts, it becomes more likely that a person from a non target demographic stumbles across the information. 

The Triggering

As of today, my political beliefs are still primarily characterized as libertarian. But as a result of my keen interest in psychometrics, many of the facts I avidly read about are widely circulated in white nationalist circles, less so in libertarian avenues. Does mean I skew more towards the alt-right than I previously did? I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. However, as my HBD enlightenment grows, so too do my perceived flaws in libertarianism arise. Take, for example, political beliefs in a nation. If it happens to be the case that political views are more heavily derived from hereditary qualities than environment or reason, and hispanics predominantly do not agree with traditional American fundamentals (particularly liberty and democracy), then it very well may be the case that closing the borders in order to maintain and foster political views that produce both economic and social well being in a nation is a tenable option.

    This biological/genomic/hereditary component to politics becomes more and more apparent the further I read. I don’t consider myself racist in any way, but it becomes easy to imagine how carefully someone might need to tread.  With a more malleable mindset, one could fall prey to racism when presented with biological facts and their sociological corollaries. And although I certainly do not consider myself a good person, I do contemplate often what could be done to remedy innate deficits of ethnic groups in an effort to close the gap between them and higher achieving ones. The most cited and distinct gap in mean intellectual capacity between groups is the 85 IQ average of African-Americans and 100 IQ mean of U.S. whites. That’s a sizable gap, and considering the associative properties of those values it does seem to explain much of the disparity in social tendencies between those groups. However, I’ve read that British blacks average around 94. In the event that African American IQ can raise that high, we would see a far more equitable arrangement in social outcomes. It’s actually a very optimistic number, and you can think of the implications! That’s around the same disparity between White Americans and Asian Americans, and while there is a conspicuous difference between the two, the social outcomes aren’t too substantial- there might be a gifted class comprised of sixty percent Asians and forty percent Whites (not taking into account other ethnic groups in this example.) However, there has long been an effort to compensate for the deficits between black americans in particular, with not much success. (Since I am saying this, I suppose I should take it upon myself to actually find these studies that claim this- instead of referencing bloggers that summarize the studies.) Nonetheless, though Black Americans score lower than whites on average, I do realize that the distributions overlap and don’t have any difficulty judging a person on an individual basis. I suppose this is what differentiates me from the alt right; they either don’t care or don’t comprehend the intersecting distributions.

       With respect to my own cognitive ability, I genuinely do not know where to place it. It does appear to me at this point in time that it’s lopsided towards verbal prowess rather than fluid intelligence. There are routes I feel could guarantee me success (politics) but I find myself interested more in science, I love reading about associations in social sciences. Even statistics, which is a firmly quantitative discipline, I enjoy. Although I cannot quantify this, I feel I have decent mathematical intuition. I’ve also yet to see my peers calculate equations in their head as opposed to working them out on paper. Conversely, I don’t feel I understand mathematics at a quicker rate than any of my peers.

Either I hate planning things out because I’m inherently unorderly, or I’m unorderly because I make existential justifications to do so. If I plan out my entire life, I’d likely be reasonably successful. But if I develop a plan for my life starting from now and stick to it, I feel there’s something missing from it existentially.

    

The Big Three

Here, I list three people that have been very influential for me, and hopefully society at large. I don’t necessarily believe that’s the case. But that’s besides the point; I want to propagate their content beyond its intellectual niche (though I suppose my own blog will fill that same cranny.)

 

Stephen Hsu: A physics professor at Michigan State Univerity that has a keen interest in genomics. Has developed algorithms for BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) and aided them in searching for genes that are associated with intelligence. Very insightful, though not quite as verbose in comparison to other Human BioDiversity bloggers. Though, he compensates with his command of mathematics; this unfortunately isn’t digested as easily. 

Razib Khan: UC Berkeley genomics student on leave, former columnist for the Unz Review. Khan’s mastery of history and the English language coupled with his genomics forte leaves a repository of content I’ve only briefly viewed, due only to  sheer riot. He is a very intriguing character due to his involvement in publications commonly associated with the alt-right (this does not reflect my own views on their work) and his stint as a columnist for the New York times followed by his firing within the same day. The concoction of quality and quantity displayed on his blog in my opinion isn’t approached by any other on this list. 

Greg Cochran: Adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, with formal training in optical physics. Greg’s brusque demeanor is intellectually attractive, as it follows with a no-bullshit approach to academic discourse. His blog’s format is clean and also reflective of this crisp approach.

Steve’s blog: infoproc.blogspot.com

Razib’s blog: razib.com/wordpress

Greg’s blog: westhunt.wordpress.com

Animus

This blog is primarily intended for those that value free speech and science above other principles. At any rate, it doesn’t truly matter whether I intend for this blog to predominantly consist of rational, independent thinkers because the content is going to select for those inclined anyways.

I don’t subscribe to any particular tenets but politically I identify as a libertarian, however fashionable it is in young right leaning circles today. I’m unabashedly right-wing, I don’t dance around it and label myself as a “moderate” or “independent.” Yes, I’m nuanced enough to understand that libertarianism is essentially classical liberalism and shares economic views with modern conservatives but aligns more closely with liberals on social issues. This is obvious, but given that modern libertarianism gains more traction in the conservative movement, I feel more comfortable labeling myself as such. Besides, I’m far more incensed by SJW’s than some regulation on marijuana (though I disagree wholeheartedly.)

IQ exists, it has statistical validity, and there are many societal outcomes associated with it. This too is obvious. It isn’t a difficult concept to grasp and the negligence of contemporary society regarding its existence is due solely to political correctness. This was eye-opening to me. Prior to familiarizing myself with intelligence and genomics I legitimately did not believe that scientific research could be stifled by politics. At least not in the 21st century.